The Breums had never run a Rule 5 draft in the BBA before. Prior to the big day, the Breums and their front office team worked hard to prepare. A war room was set up, with the walls covered with lists of players who were thought to be available. Bob combed through the lists for position players that could help the big league club, while his son Erik hunted for hurlers that could bolster the pitching staff. Eventually, they met across the big mahogany table in the board room and merged their lists, agreeing on the final order after much give and take. Both were excited that this represented a golden opportunity to implement some incremental upgrades to their new club.
Before the draft, their new assistant GM Luis Álvarez had the unfortunate duty to serve as the bosses' hatchet man, calling in veteran catcher John Stanley and a few AAA players to inform them that they were being waived to clear room on the 40-man roster prior to the draft.
Draft day dawned and the Breums were set. Using the league-provided form, they carefully filled it out, transcribing their master list. As required by the BBA, they made sure to transmit the form electronically to the league office before the deadline. Both went home to their beds with visions of exciting new players in their heads, like children on Christmas Eve.
The next morning, however, did not bring them the sleigh full of new players of which they had dreamed all night. The league informed them that they had drafted exactly one player, pitcher Juan 'Oz' Cruz.
Juan 'Oz' Cruz
Both GMs descended on the war room early the next morning, determined to understand how this fiasco had occurred. Many of the players on their list had gone undrafted. It was inexplicable. Had the league made a mistake?
After much finger pointing, it was the Gen Z intern who saved the new GMs from even greater embarrassment, as she meekly identified the problem just moments before Bob Breum was planning to call up the league office and demand answers. Apparently, neither of the Breums had read the fine print in the league's draft procedures manual. She explained that the league draft spreadsheet had separate worksheets for each round of the draft, and they had left all of them blank after the first round worksheet. The league naturally assumed they they wished to only draft one player, and accommodated them.
It was Bob Breum who had completed the league spreadsheet. He was devastated. He apologized profusely to his son and to their front office staff who had put so much work into the draft preparation. He explained that he knew of the requirement to copy the list over to the other pages, and that in fact he had done so early on in the process when the list was still in its formative stages. But after the final list was arrived at, he forgot to copy it. It is unlikely that he will make that mistake again, but the club will pay the price for his negligence this season.
